Some changes 'round 'ere

Hello! You might notice a fresh coat of paint if you've been here before; if not and if you're brand new to me, welcome! I have a slowly-filling archive of posts on this here Webbed-Sight that you can read if you're interested in my thoughts on a variety of topics; otherwise my name is Joshua and I'm a writer and game developer based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

I had previously been running this site on a Ghost installation; after a decade of Wordpress experience (for better or worse) on my older websites and with Automattic's CEO still doing the sort of crazy shit that seems to be fashionable with all techbro CEOs lately, I didn't want to use Wordpress again and asked the internet for replacement recommendations last year (also, it's been like a decade since I've last had a blog anyway; I was certain there had to be newer, more modern replacements to Wordpress by this point). Enough people suggested Ghost, so I set it up. It was a pretty big headache from the beginning but I kinda-sorta just thought "I guess this is simply what the internet is these days" and accepted it; however, by accident last week I heard about Hugo and remembered that static websites were once a thing, and that there were tools these days that made managing them much less painful than in the dark ages of the internet (the old dark ages, not the current techbro-fascist algo-pilled timeline we're currently all under the thumb of).

Related to the above: earlier in the year, I finally incorporated my own company through which I intend to release my future creative work (and have consolidated older projects like Alcyone: The Last City and Iyetra) under. As such, I'm very pleased to announce the formation of Strange Artifice, my new studio. I'm incredibly excited about it, but in the short term I knew I needed to do something about consolidating and updating my internet presences so everything felt cohesive and consistent if I was going to bring everything together under a single identity. I'd been putting it off, but with last week's realisation that there were better options than Ghost, I finally got off my ass to get everything nice and pretty.

Hence, where we are now. I've aggregated all of my projects under Strange Artifice directly, and have also decided to extend that to keeping social media under consistent identities, instead of as separate projects, as well. I'll also be archiving and retiring the disparate handles for my different projects and aggregating everything under my own name or Strange Artifice's going forward.

All of my personal stuff (this website and my own portfolio site) will be under my name, specifically, while all my professional creative projects will be under Strange Artifice. Rather than keeping separate accounts for each project (particularly social media) I'm going to pull everything under those two umbrellas instead.

So, that's why my websites have gotten a facelift; instead of using different Carrd pages across four separate projects — which were inconsistent and half-hearted designs I threw together from their built-in styles in an afternoon without a lot of effort to it — I dusted off my webdesign and CSS skills and did a unified design for the main landing pages, project pages, and blog specifically. The site pages are static HTML since they don't need anything fancy; the blog is pulled together from a git repository on my server, with entries done in markdown and converted into the template you see here served with Hugo. I've dramatically cut down on the possible security ingresses and I don't have to keep up with Ghost's convoluted security updates. I also decided to scrap the membership and newsletter features; comments are pulled straight from Bluesky and Mastodon replies automatically, showing up beneath appropriate entries directly without me needing to maintain a commenting system myself. It's pretty cool, serves pages super fast, and the blog template is entirely customisable by me instead of relying on someone else's APIs and hooks.

So if you're not following me on social media, please do! I'm @joshuameadows.com or @strangeartifice.com on Bluesky, and @joshuameadows@mastodon.social or @strangeartifice@mastodon.social on Mastodon. All of my future stuff will be through here or one of those places. Thanks for checking it out!